


The Heart Holds a Seed

by wordstrings



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Angst, Angst and Feels, Aziraphale Loves Crowley (Good Omens), BAMF Aziraphale (Good Omens), BAMF Crowley (Good Omens), Bottom Crowley (Good Omens), Crowley Loves Aziraphale (Good Omens), Crowley Loves Kids (Good Omens), Crowley might be the original tempter but he's also the original pine tree, Crowley's Plants (Good Omens), Crowley's tears are for watering plants, Eventual Romance, F/M, Female Crowley (Good Omens), Genderfluid Crowley (Good Omens), Hair Kink, Hurt Crowley (Good Omens), Hurt/Comfort, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), Ineffable Idiots (Good Omens), M/M, Male Crowley (Good Omens), Masturbation, POV Crowley (Good Omens), Pining, Protective Aziraphale (Good Omens), Protective Crowley (Good Omens), Reference to Torture, Romance, Slow Burn, Top Aziraphale (Good Omens), but the comfort is from a plant, demons with feels, happiness is the enemy of fanfiction, sad orgasms, so much pining it's lethal, the angel's hair kink blazoned across the heavens
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-23
Updated: 2020-04-29
Packaged: 2021-02-28 16:33:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23270266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wordstrings/pseuds/wordstrings
Summary: Crawly's first friend on Planet Earth was Aziraphale--but his second, in Jerusalem of 1231 BC after a heartbreaking fight with the angel, was a houseplant.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 105
Kudos: 216





	1. Chapter 1

The first time the Whole Houseplant Thing happens, Crawly had just concluded a horrific row with the angel, because of course he had.

Hissing under his breath, Crawly slinks along the dusty streets of Bethlehem. Although it’s very early—dawn just drew warm fingertips across the horizon’s brow—people are beginning to stir. He’s been stalking and slithering like this for hours. The harvest season is the most critical time of year for the people of Israel, and the barley they reap will keep them alive when the goats are too lean to produce much milk, and the eggs have been snatched from under the skinny hens. They’ll wrap their flat barley breads around cucumbers and tomatoes, stir the toasted barley grains into their stews. Crawly doesn’t give a toss about any of this in the culinary sense.

Aziraphale does. He cares about everything in a very human way. He quite enjoys barley stew, actually. Not the way he enjoys baklava with halloumi cheese stuffed inside, or fresh greens, or roasted lamb, or biting into a ripe fig, the seeds soft under his white teeth, licking his lips as if he never wants to see the cool, clean light of Heaven again, or--

 _Leave it,_ Crawly snaps at himself.

Ostensibly, Crawly is in Bethlehem to tempt a wealthy merchant to be miserly and refuse to lend a poor man funds on the grounds that usury is a sin—when really, the filthy rich bugger wouldn’t have missed the entire sum of the loan any more than he’d miss the breath from a sneeze, and the would-be borrower was going to use the money to provide his daughter with a dowry. She’d met a fine young man, honest and hardworking, but his parents were mercenary enough to demand their due of cattle and spices and tablecloths and whatnot. The economics of it seem especially unfair for the young woman, who’d certainly not chosen to be born to poor parents. But no one ever consults Crawly about economics.

The thing is, Crawly isn’t terribly keen on thwarting young love. Not when he knows within a reasonable margin of error what it feels like, that terrible ache that sometimes freezes his tongue and burns his soul, supposing demons even have souls, which Crawly highly doubts. What he feels probably isn’t exactly like human love, and it certainly isn’t holy love. But it isn’t just lust and it isn’t just idolatry or covetousness, or any other sinful words, and thus Crawly can’t find a better term for it.

Anyway, he’s piss poor at breaking hearts. Making trouble, sure. Smashing hopes?

Not really his scene.

So he did exactly what a reasonable demon was supposed to do, and then reported back to Downstairs about it, and the poor man walked out of the merchant’s cream-colored brick house in despair, and lo and behold, discovered that another merchant had suddenly set up business in a building that wasn’t there half an hour ago, a fellow with long red hair braided down his back and bizarrely yellow eyes, a man selling occult talismans, and the would-be father of the bride walked out of this mysterious new shop with his pockets full of miracled silver.

Really though, Crawly is there because he knew Aziraphale would be there too.

He’d indicated as much the last time they saw each other, in Khartoum. He’d been eating a dish of ground fava beans with scorched bread to dip in it, as perfectly at ease with himself and his corporation and his assignments and his purpose and his indulgences as he always was, and Crawly had just stared and stared, because that seemed like pretty much all Crawly knew how to do around the angel.

_Other than make a fucking idiot of yourself._

“Where to next then?” Crawly’d asked, downing the last of the honey wine and promptly refilling their glasses to full. Aziraphale rarely left when there were libations remaining in his cup or chalice or mug or goblet or whatever. Crawly trusted that today would prove no exception. That wasn’t a temptation exactly, surely it wasn’t, that was part gift and part invitation.

“Oh, I’m for Bethlehem after this,” Aziraphale replied with enthusiasm. It is the year 1231 BC, and thoughts of Bethlehem and a heroically painful and filthy childbirth with Gabriel, the complete sod, blasting heavenly trumpets while the Son of God tries to take his first nap, hasn’t devastated them yet. “I’m to bless a young widow who will remarry and eventually give birth to an influential rabbi. It’s all going to be rather lovely this time round, I think. And you?”

“Dunno. I’ve nothing on at the moment.”

Aziraphale frowned. Then the pretty Egyptian serving girl arrived with another plate of grilled whatevers skewered onto sticks, and he briefly beamed at her. “Oh, thank you! This looks delightful. So you’ll just…get creative about it, I suppose? Foment unrest and blasphemy wheresoever you go?”

“Don’t get all flowery on me, angel. My wiliest wiles so far are plans to take a solid nap. So you don’t need to fuss over it. If you were thwarting my nap, you’d just be waking me up and enabling more chaos, which seems. Mmmk. Counterproductive.”

Aziraphale chuckled into his cup. He’d made the angel laugh, again. And Crawly could feel ichor leaking from someplace important and internal.

_Stupid. So fucking stupid. It was going so well._

_Why are you this stupid?_

So Crawly arrived in Bethlehem too, because Aziraphale said he was going to be there and for no other reason. He hadn’t even prepared a very plausible excuse, and one miserly merchant wasn’t going to cut the mustard. He belatedly thought that if Hastur wanted to know what the Heaven he was doing there, he really ought to have already accomplished something further. Most of the locals were at the barley harvest, which sounded important and thus stressful, so Crawly made his way to the fields, where he drew his black robes closer around himself and kept his head down and listened in for a good opportunity.

A harmless temptation, nothing that need keep him up at night. Just enough for Hell to buy, and Aziraphale to overlook. Whilst he waited for the angel to appear.

He’d only been wandering the neatly planted rows for a quarter of an hour, cloaked in a smallish miracle of indifference to his presence, when he overheard two women arguing, one of them tearily. He never liked that sound. It deeply resembled the _why is this happening to me_ noises he’d heard from several dozen of his fellow angels plummeting into scorching sulphur before he finally screamed with every particle of his immortal being at Her _how can You NOT love them anymore? once you love, how can you STOP?_ and took the plunge himself. Belly flop style.

“I told you, Ruth,” an elegant woman with deeply lined eyes and granite-grey hair pleaded as she wept. “They won’t let us stay here, they won’t let us glean. Two more were just thrown out of the fields. At the best, we’ll get the same treatment. At the worst, we’ll be punished. You have to leave me. I’m not asking this of you.”

“Naomi,” the other said clearly. She was perhaps twenty years younger, with a round face and beautiful black curls. “You did tell me. We’ve already had this conversation.”

“Then why won’t you obey me?”

“Because it goes against everything I am and everything I love. Wherever you go, I will go.”

“No,” Naomi said on a sob.

“Wherever you lodge, I will lodge.”

“We have nowhere to lodge.”

“Your people shall be my people, and your God my God,” Ruth said.

Crawly watched, rapt.

Naomi shuddered. “I can’t be responsible for your misery. For your hunger, your lack of shelter, I can’t, Ruth, you’ve already been through too much and I won’t add to your destitution and your suffering. Go back to your people now. Please. I am begging.”

Ruth took Naomi’s hands, clutching them to her chest. “Don’t you understand? My mother detested me. She beat me with reeds when the breakfast wasn’t served hot. She forced me to weave until my fingers were bleeding. But even if none of that had happened, it wouldn’t matter. I loved your son Mahlon. I loved him to distraction. I love you, and I have no one and nothing else to love. How can you try to send me away?”

Crawly instantly snapped his fingers and the owner of the field in question, Boaz, looked up from where he was studying an accounting of the harvest yields so far with one of his servants. He caught Ruth’s warm brown eyes over her mother-in-law’s shoulder. He saw the despair in them, yes, but also the kindness, and the beauty too. She felt a prickling in her heart. He did in his. Their hair follicles tingled. Their skins were attracted—not unnaturally, not even in an occult sense, but in a way neither had noticed before this ozone rush, this crawling and beautiful and wondrous feeling which had started creeping up and down their arms.

 _Nice,_ Crawly thought in a rare moment of self-satisfaction.

They’d be married pretty damn quickly if Crawly knew anything about both human nature and his own capacity for temptation. Which he did.

_Why. Are. You. So. Stupid._

Crawly wraps the rough black linen closer around himself. He passes a shepherd with a butchered lamb over his shoulder. He passes a café opening its doors. He shouldn’t be cold, it’s bloody morning in Palestine. Bethlehem isn’t Mongolia.

_You should never have spoken to him like that._

Crawly was having a celebratory drink last night in the only decent tavern Bethlehem boasted, waiting for the angel. This was his next assignment, he’d said as much, of course he’d show up to sample the fare. Crawly was feeling unduly satisfied over thoughts of Ruth and Naomi’s future. He ordered two pitchers of house wine, a plate of those preserved olives the angel liked so much, and barley bread. He himself wouldn’t touch it, but the angel would use it to sop up the oil and juices. He’d smile at Crawly and Crawly would have something to live on until he materialized in Aziraphale’s vicinity again.

When Aziraphale did walk into the public house, his blue eyes widened almost comically.

“Crawly!” He sat down immediately on the opposite side of the rough-hewn table. “What could you possibly be doing here? Did Hell send you a memo to thwart what I was doing? Confess, now!”

“Hullo, angel. I, ah.” Crawly struggled to speak and not hiss. “No, you. Sssaid. To me, that you were coming.”

Aziraphale frowned in confusion while Crawly fought not to swallow his own forked tongue.

“Here you are, yeah, and like I mentioned, I had nothing on, so.” Crawly shrugged. “Thought we might have another drink, s’all.”

“Oh.” The angel seemed quite confused. “Of course, that would be lovely. But you really haven’t anything you’d rather be doing?”

Crawly fought the urge to crawl on his belly right the fuck out of this bar.

“Nope,” he replied. “My dance card is pretty free. In general. As a, yeah, a usual thing. Not terribly occupied.”

“Well, that can’t be true.” Aziraphale smirked, all white curls and soft lines. “There being so many more humans around these days, there must be plenty of them for you to tempt?”

“Right. Well, yes.”

“So then what’s the trouble?”

“There isn’t any. Trouble, that is. I’m not even making any. Which is literally my job.”

“Dear boy, what’s wrong? You seem all at sixes and sevens.”

“I’m feeling lazy, I s’pose. I’m a demon. It’s a pretty common vice with us. And sixes and sevens? Angel. For Hell’s sake. No one talks like that.”

“You’re mistaken. I talk like that,” the angel replied primly. “If you aren’t making trouble, then what are you scheming to do with yourself, you villainous serpent you?”

“Wherever you will go, I will go,” Crawly whispered.

Aziraphale didn’t even register this. “Oh, they have pickled things here. Have you tried them in this region? Sharper than in other locales, I think, and more garlic, but I’d be grateful for a second opinion.”

“Listen,” Crawly breathed, “you don’t have to, to…ermk. Do anything. But.”

“Crawly. Are you all right?”

“No, and I haven’t been for a very long time, what kind of question is that, honestly.” Crawly forced his tongue into some semblance of submission that could actually pronounce the phrase _some semblance of submission_. “Listen, here’s. I think this is the best plan. OK?”

Aziraphale blinked. Crawly leaned against the table with his arms crossed, breathing far too hard for a creature who doesn’t need to breathe.

“All right.” Crawly took another long, unnecessary heave of air.

“My dear boy, you’re clearly in need of—”

“Where you go, I will go.”

“What, um, did you…”

“Please. Let me finish.”

“I don’t—”

“Wherever you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall be my people. Well, with exceptions, but Gabriel is a complete twat, and don’t get me started on Michael, but…never mind. And I can’t, nope, can’t really promise that your God will be my God, but, uh.”

Aziraphale’s eyes were as wide and clear as the Adriatic.

“But please just let me be with you…all the time?”

_Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid._

_Spread your robe over me, please._

_Just._

_Please. I’ve never seen anything like you, and I made star systems._

“It would give you more of an opportunity to thwart me if you want to look at it that way,” he offered after an excruciating silence, extending his index finger. “Right? Keep an eye on the opposition. Mmmk, closer tabs on me?”

He is growing so fucking weary of feeling like this.

Crawly passes a beggar who looks up at him with wide, startled eyes, and he is absolutely not crying, negative, the wind is just in his face and he’s trying to see with these fucking stupid eyes.

_For Satan’s sake._

_Get a grip on yourself._

He has to stop reliving this cock-up, he has to, he has to, or he’s going to lose his human form, and they kill snakes in these parts faster than you can say fuck a duck. To remind himself, he punches the nearest wall. It doesn’t do much to his hand; he’s fantastically powerful, by human standards anyway. But it does hurt, ground him better in his body, and pain is familiar to Crawly. Maybe more familiar than any other sensation.

_Yep, definitely. No contest._

Crawly keeps walking.

Of course, the angel didn’t react well to the suggestion that Crowley abide with him for the foreseeable, preferably eternity. His eyes were warm for a moment, though. Breathtaking. Like stepping into the ocean and finding it as temperate as a summer breeze. So Crawly knows that it wasn’t a distasteful idea. It was only an idea that the angel was afraid of. And he never wants the angel to be frightened. Not of him, or Hell, or Heaven, or anything in between.

Aziraphale schooled his features.

_Whatever are you on about, you foul fiend?_

_I…no, just, well. I thought—_

_Well you thought quite entirely wrong, didn’t you? I’m not going to fall for whatever trick you’re pulling that easily._

_It’s not a trick!_

_How could it possibly be anything else? You aren’t capable of anything other than trickery, after all. Any suggestion made by the likes of you is automatically trickery. I ought to have sniffed out a wile the moment I saw you sitting here so unexpectedly. I’m shocked at myself._

_Angel--_

_Say no more about it, please. This round goes to Heaven._

_But I’m—_

_Not another word out of you! For the Original Tempter, I’d have expected a more plausible ploy. Lord knows you’ve had enough practice. Now. Would you please pass the olive oil?_

Crawly feels like he’s losing his mind.

So the first time The Whole Plant Thing happens, Crawly doesn’t exactly know why it happens. But he’s walking past one of the last houses on the outskirts of Bethlehem when he sees a plant set outside of a door.

It’s a fairly withered little decorative palm. It has leaf spots. The tips are drying out, and clearly the family discarding it thought it was no longer in any way an aesthetic addition to their dwelling place. It is, in strict point of fact, rather an ugly plant in the first place. But now it’s both ugly and dying. Crawly doesn’t quite know why he stops.

He does stop, though.

 _You’re never like this! The entire proposal is absurd. What, what exactly are you trying to tempt me into?_ Aziraphale had spluttered at last.

The absolute staggering gargantuan pestilent nerve of the angel sometimes. Crawly wasn’t. He hadn’t even once attempted to seduce the angel into anything. He never would. Crawly wants the angel to be exactly as he is—an angel, so tempting him into anything is a ghastly notion. He wants Aziraphale to be exactly like Aziraphale. He just wants to be near him, all of the time, and if expressing that was a frightening prospect for Aziraphale, then he’d simply never do it again, and that would be that.

 _Nobody cares about either of us, do they?_ he thinks as he looks at the plant.

“Right,” he growls, “just as worthlessss as I am, aren’t you? You pathetic excuse for interior décor, why can’t you get it right, don’t you know that’s why you’ve been thrown out on the sstreetsss, you ruined little nothing of a creature. This might seem unfair, but it’s entirely your fault.”

The plant remains still.

“No one wants you!” Crawly screams in rage.

And thus, The Whole House Plant Thing begins.

Crawly picks up the plant and carries it home to his lodging, or rather the mysterious merchant’s combined shop and lodging. He snips its dead leaves and miracles a mist over the rest. He waters it. He’s never done anything so utterly mad before, so he’s unsure exactly how to help beyond that. With spindly fingers, he hovers his hand over the soil, sensing the roots. He can see them, dried out and hurting, in his mind’s eye, and with another snap, there are nutrients in the pot.

Leaning over, Crawly directs menacing yellow eyes at his new roommate.

“If you so much as dare to keep wilting after today, you lazy bastard, I will eat you for a ssssalad.”

The plant says nothing. Probably doesn’t know that Crawly doesn’t eat, either. Still. It’s the principle of the thing.

“Get it right this time,” Crawly admonishes. “Or else.”

When he throws himself on his pallet, ready to sleep for at least a decade or else maybe throw himself in the Jordan River tomorrow, he glances back at the plant. It’s perking up already. Its leaves aren’t quite as forlorn, and its color is better. Crawly yanks the single tie out of his braid and cards his fingers through his curls until they’re everywhere, halfway down his back. He turns onto his side fully.

“I s’pose you’ll be expecting things now, won’t you?” he sneers. “Now I can’t even get the sleep I need without watering your sorry little arse.”

The plant, in silent reflection, does not disagree.

“The thing is,” Crawly sighs. “Bugger. Shit, bugger, the thing, is, he does love me. I know he does.”

Aziraphale loves everything. He can’t not love Crawly. But Crawly has never seen his face light up the way it does for the demon for a single other person, place, or thing, not even those dates with the cured pork wrapped around them.

“All right. I pushed too far. S’my fault.”

The plant gleams in commiseration.

“I can take that,” Crawly whispers. “They could have sent, dunno, bloody Uriel up here. Or Gabriel, blergh, Gabriel. But it’s just me and him, and we might be enemies and all that shite, but he…he touches my hair when he’s drunk. Constantly. He’s put his arm round my shoulders several times. Once he even held my hand, at a party in Babylon where everyone was meant to go in pairs and…dunno, publicly stick things in each other. And he didn’t mind, he didn’t. I can sense fear. Anger. Despair. All of that, s’what I do, and Aziraphale, he might be afraid to have me lurking around all the time, but it doesn’t. That doesn’t matter. I’ll just go where he goes m’self, as often as possible without putting him off. He is so bloody beautiful. I’ll keep you alive, all right, and I’ll show you? Now, stop interrupting me. Go the Heaven to sleep and I’ll…I’ll wake up tomorrow and you’d better have fucking toed the line.”

The Whole Plant Thing, Crawly does not realize as he drifts off, will be one of the things keeping him sane for thousands of years.


	2. Chapter 2

Crawly sleeps for maybe a day and a half. He isn’t certain. But his remarkable facility with time tells him it’s around eight in the morning, perhaps on a Thursaturday or Mondesday, why quibble really, he could concentrate if he really wanted to know, when he wakes up with a fresh crack in his heart, a mild headache, and drool on his pillow.

“Lovely,” Crawly sighs, fisting his snarled hair before reaching for the little tortoiseshell comb on the bedside table.

His first notion, of course, is to skip town before any awkward accidental meetings can take place. So after detangling the mass of wild curls and cleaning his teeth, he begins to pack his meagre things (thus far a jug of wine, another jug of wine, a third jug of wine, and the little ceramic mug Aziraphale drank from in the tavern yesterday for Crowley to sip the wine) to leave Bethlehem in disgrace. 

At first, his thoughts continue to run along the lines of _stupid, stupid, if you don’t get less stupid pretty bloody quickly, you’ll lose him, and then what’ll be left in Heaven, Earth, or Hell for you?_

_Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life._

_Is it any wonder that I don’t like eating food, when it all tastes exactly the same? Like soil. Clay. Sand. Ridiculous angel. Even more ridiculous Crawly. I’ll never taste solid sustenance again, but I don’t want to see your face sag when I tell you that. Angel, if I fucked this up too badly, if you fell the way I did those millennia ago, how much do you think you’ll enjoy DUST instead of garlic-crusted lamb shank? Because they’d seem exactly alike. Of course I shouldn’t be allowed to share all my long days with you._

_The longer nights either._

On and on his mind circles, like a moon in orbit. Perpetual freefall.

 _The freefall wasn’t perpetual when it counted,_ he reminds himself grimly.

But as his thoughts inevitably wear themselves out, a detail nags at Crawly. Regarding the angel. Because of course it is. Most of his thoughts are about the angel, obviously, but unlike the others, this one isn’t rooted in _if I held you, really held you, would it be like it was so very long ago when my palms cupped starlight?_

“What are you staring at?” Crowley snaps at the now-healthy little ornamental palm. It’s still ugly, but at least it isn’t rotting away anymore. “Something is just…it just now caught my attention. Mmmph. Yeah, I know I was distracted before, OK, _shut it_ , you miserable scrap of flora.”

Hissing at his sole houseplant as he wraps its base carefully in a woolen cloth, Crawly grows increasingly curious about something. That his temptation between Ruth and Boaz was effective he has no doubt—they were already drawn to one another, which makes tempting about as simple as gently pushing a blind drunk off a log. But the words of the angel who rejected him so roundly chime in his ears. Intriguing and unbidden. When he had asked what Aziraphale was doing in Bethlehem at all.

_I’m to bless a young widow who will remarry and eventually give birth to an influential rabbi._

“Oh, for the love of…he didn’t,” the demon mutters. “No. It’s too perfect, too perfectly _fucked_ , if that’s what he did.”

Crawly closes bile-yellow eyes, expanding his senses. Occult energy, operating at a low scarlet crackle, sizzles across the sleeping town unnoticed. 

It glances off several shepherds, a baby swaddled in a crib, one goat, an elderly man dreaming of his beloved first wife (who died in childbirth twenty years ago), and a restless little girl staring up at the sunrise before it settles on Ruth, sound asleep next to Naomi on their shared pallet, huddled against her chosen mother for shared warmth. The bed is hard and the wind whispers through cracks in the walls. He can feel her contentment with her company even through her despair at her circumstances, however, and is almost jealous of a destitute mortal female.

Almost.

Gritting his teeth, because this will hurt like all blazes if he finds what he thinks he’ll find, Crawly dips himself into her aura.

The yelp he makes as a blade of purest white light slashes across his consciousness has nothing on the pain of impending separation from its source. 

_You could bless me if you wanted to, angel, if you think it would make me any cleaner. It wouldn’t, it would fuck me up something royal, but I’d let you. I’d rather feel more pain if it belongs to you than nothing from you at all._

Crawly falls back on his bed, panting in misery while groaning in frustration. Because he and Aziraphale just tempted and blessed the identical person. She’s still got angel juice all over her.

“This is sodding ridiculous, wandering all over the bloody place to do exactly the same thing,” Crawly snaps. “Why the Heaven shouldn’t I follow you if this is how we operate? I’ll end up where you are regardless, I always do even when I don’t quite exactly mean it that way. It, I can’t _not._ I don’t. You don’t understand. Like I told you, you daft thing, you didn’t have to do anything except thwart me and…also do all the things we do anyhow. The not-thwarting. Get sloshed and talk rubbish. Why shouldn’t I just…just…”

He tries to breathe slowly. Tries to forget how he felt yesterday. Hot and humiliated and wrong all over.

“Be with you,” Crawly whispers, aching inside. “All the time.”

And then, at his plant, “What are _you still_ looking at, you pathetic excuse for a life form?”

The plant, as he has already come to expect, frowns at him but fails to make verbal reply.

“Oh, nngp, right right right right, like you could have done any better, you had a family and botched it so thorough they chucked you out too, and _hello_! Street corner! With the rest of the rubbish! I don’t see where you have the bollocks to judge me, I’ve been judged quite enough for ten lifetimes already thank you, and if you keep this shite up I will absolutely dry you out and ssssmoke you in a cigar.”

His palm tree subsides, sympathetic. It’s really looking remarkably lush. Glossy desert-green leaves, gnarled tubular base. Crawly should get it a better container. He’ll choose a new one wherever he sets up shop next, give some local custom. It’ll be something to do, at any rate.

“Yep, we’re off!” Clapping his hands, Crawly launches himself in his appalling lurching swagger off the bed. “Nothing to see here. Places to go, humans to tempt.”

He snaps his fingers before the wall and a full-length mirror appears. They’re rather unheard of in Bethlehem, of course. He takes in his too-raptorlike nose and his too-sulphurous eyes and his too-bony clavicles peeking out of the collar of the black robes. His too-red hair and the too-visible heart there on his sleeve.

“It’s a wonder he loves you at all,” he mutters, frowning. “And if he weren’t made of the stuff, literally, he wouldn’t. Anyone who isn’t oozing love out of every molecule would take one look and say _thank you, next_? How’s about we stop forgetting that? Yeah? Fantastic.”

Tossing most of his hair over his too-skinny shoulders, Crawly quickly fashions a crown of braids to keep it out of his too-angular face. He stretches. The too-grinding bones crack, little pinpricks of pain down his spine, in his joints. Satisfied, he banishes the mirror. The merchant’s house he’ll leave where it is, he supposes. Who gives a shriveled prune anyhow when nothing was there before? Someone can use it, perhaps. Ruth and Naomi can be squatters here while Boaz gets used to the riotous feeling in his chest. Yes, that’ll do nicely. 

Crawly scribbles a few sigils on the wall in the shape of just such a charm, blows on it to render them invisible. It’ll be a much nicer place for the barley farmer to come courting than whatever rat-fouled hovel he just glimpsed.

“Done you one better, angel,” he quips. “Housing, too. Prob’ly by nightfall. Sit and spin on it.”

Hoisting his miracle-light wine jugs in a simple leather satchel, Crawly tucks the plant carefully under his arm before exiting into the beige morning sunlight.

Walking quickly—he likes walking quickly, why get someplace slowly if you could go quickly, you’ll see more of the wide world that way—Crawly blinks at the rising sun through his glasses and tosses his hood up for good measure. The air is warmer this morning than last he was awake, thank Somebody. The palm practically purrs, lapping up star fuel.

“Yeah, OK, I get it, you want a window,” Crawly sneers. “Pretty blessed demanding little bugger for being worth about as much as a pistachio shell to your last owners, aren’t you?”

If plants could cuddle, the palm would be snuggling into his crooked arm. 

_This Whole Plant Thing,_ Crawly thinks, _is more than I bargained for._

He has to keep to the main road out of Bethlehem, there’s only one anyhow, passing him through the town square. Shops are opening, rugs are being shaken, piss pots emptied. He’s absently thinking where to go next—Hastur hasn’t said anything and might not for a week or more—when he comes to the site of his humiliation and discovers a resplendent if stuffy white-clad angel standing outside of the tavern. As if waiting. For Crawly apparently, because Aziraphale’s face lights up in a nervous sort of smile. He gives a well-manicured wave.

Crawly just about flies out of his sandals. Or flies off into the sky.

_Did he see me palm his drinking cup the other day? Is he here to smite me finally? And over a ruddy CUP?_

“Um,” he says intelligently. “Erk…hi there.”

_Why. Are. You. So. Stupid._

“All right?” Aziraphale says pleasantly. “Good to see you. I…rather thought that you might pass this way as you toddled off, Crawly, and I wanted a word. Would you care to join me for breakfast? That is! If you aren’t in a rush to your next temptation?”

_Toddled off. I am hardly toddling anyplace, you insane, beautiful walking miracle. It’s a sort of upright slither, and it’s humiliating._

“Uuuh,” he says, now protecting his chest with the plant. His heart needs a moat. His vitals need ramparts. His soft parts aren’t soft, but they need armored plates all the same. “I, well. Time’s it now, nine-ish? Of what day? Never mind. I’m um. See, there’s this…but that’s not really until…and it’s not like the trip over is really that…yeah, if. Sure, for a quick. If you want. That is, if you haven’t anyone else to… Yes.”

Crawly can feel the plant rolling its non-existent eyes and gives it a menacing shake.

“What’s that you’ve got there?” Aziraphale inquires, coming closer. “Oh, how perfectly darling. I didn’t know you grew things!”

_I grew stars, galaxies, nebulas, supernovas, black holes. You wouldn’t remember._

“Trash,” Crawly answers promptly. “This is just, mmk, trash I picked up. Got binned.”

Aziraphale gentles his hand over a leaf with a raised brow. “That’s odd. So beautifully cared for, it looks like. And wouldn’t littering be exactly your department?”

“Ah, not…as such. Never much a one for it.”

“Oh. Of course. You wouldn’t be, I suppose, you’re always so meticulous.”

Aziraphale is openly staring at the circlet of blood-red braids peeking out from Crawly’s hood with a fond, wistful expression and Crawly is going to discorporate right here, on this street in Bethlehem, holding a leftover houseplant.

He’s going to have to rethink The Whole Houseplant Thing. Immediately.

“Well, it’s really just my job to tempt the _humans,_ see, and as for the Earth itself…I’m fond. What I mean is, no, I’m perfectly uh, neutral on the subject. Not fond, and not not-fond. Don’t give a toss. Don’t like litter. Unaesthetic. Clutter, _eghk._ D’you have a table yet, or…?” Crawly finishes desperately, heart hammering.

Smiling in that gorgeous secret way he has, Aziraphale leads him inside, and the three of them sit by the window. The angel, the demon, and the houseplant. Aziraphale orders some sort of baked eggs in a tomato-ish stew, yolks as brilliant and occasionally runny as Crawly’s eyes. Crawly orders a drink because he needs one. Desperately. The houseplant orders nothing because it’s still guzzling up sunlight.

Crawly feels almost parental. She made the Sun, of course. But he made plentiful sunshine, starbeams, those hissing, boiling nuclear cores of beauty and destruction, and now his plant is eating the stuff. Fitting.

“ _Behave yourself_ ,” he mouths at the plant as Aziraphale coos over the food. “ _Or else._ ”

Aziraphale starts prattling on about how you can find versions of this dish all over the region, chopped veg and legumes with eggs and herbs baked into them, and how Crawly truly ought to try a bit, and Crawly trips head over heels in love for approximately the five million, seven hundred and forty-nine thousandth time.

The problem isn’t exactly that he wants to _be loved by_ the angel. In a _hands off—don’t touch—Heavens no—silly boy—vile tempter—another glass—do sit—staying long—my dear—good Lord_ sort of way, he knows he’s already loved, and that ought to be enough. 

Oh, things _could_ be better. Would it be satisfying for Aziraphale to seek him out for a change instead of Crawly forever marring ethereal footprints by slithering in their wake? Sure. Would he enjoy his hereditary enemy touching him, _his hair, his hands, his cheek so gently that time he’d nearly passed out cold from one too many powerful miracles in 2089 BC when all the Canaanite children were starving, nothing left of them but blood painted over bones_ , touching him without the excuse of total inebriation? Definitely. 

Would he like to try with Aziraphale some of the expressions of love he’s seen the humans indulge in since Eve and her Adam, by firesides and against walls and in the shelter of trees and spread under the stars? Yep. He doesn’t yet understand the appeal of all of them, but kissing, for instance… Kissing the angel would feel as close to forgiveness as he’ll ever come. Crawly’s certain of it. His river-water eyes would close as if in benediction. Surely.

_They would, wouldn’t they? It wouldn’t be just a pleasurable sensation to him. I wouldn’t just be an experiment. Another taste, another texture._

_Would I?_

But all of that is a piss in the wind compared to the fact he wants to _love_ Aziraphale. Bring his favorite foods (those lumpy, flaky pastries they found in Faiyum that made his lips glisten and Crawly’s tongue fork at the blaring scent of the spices). Fold his arms around Aziraphale when he’s thinking of Heavenly authority and his mouth puckers as if he’s alone in the darkness and maybe always will be. Make him smile, make him _laugh._

Refill his cup till it runneth the ever-loving fuck over.

“So.” Aziraphale wipes his mouth, refolds the napkin. How is he like this, how is _anyone_ like this? “I know you and your…your very pretty trash need to be on your way, but I made a misapprehension yesterday.”

“A what?”

“An _error_ , my dear. A professional one at that, so I thought it ought to be set to rights straight away. Between…colleagues, of sorts.”

As ever when he’s called _my dear_ , Crawly silently thanks whomever invented sunglasses.

Seeing that Crawly isn’t going to be of much use in this conversation, Aziraphale soldiers on. “You see, I make it a habit of glancing in on my miracles before I leave town. To make certain all is well with them. Not always in person, but on this occasion I was passing the widowed woman I was here to bless in the streets, and I couldn’t help but sense a distinctly… _demonic_ influence had recently been enacted on her.”

“Um. Yeah?” Crawly feigns nonchalance, burying his eyes in his drink, even though it’s empty. He miracles it full again. “S’weird.”

“You see, I thought so too.” When he dares to look up, the angel is positively beaming at him, and it’s as if the sweetest garden wind were blowing the blush across the demon’s cheekbones. “And knowing you as I do, or at least imagine I do, I investigated.”

Crawly cannot make a sound. It’ll be a squeak of unintelligible consonants or else the most sibilant hiss ever heard.

Then Aziraphale’s hand reaches out for his own on the tabletop and _time fucking stops._

“Crawly, do listen.” Aziraphale’s pert little nose ducks and his mossy eyes squint as if to peep under Crawly’s sunglasses. His hand is warm and so soft it hurts. “ _Thank you_ for enhancing my miracle. You were here without much of a plan, you told me, and so you deliberately ferreted out what I myself was up to, you cunning thing with your underhanded ways, and doubled up on my own assignment. A professional courtesy, between expert adversaries, no doubt. I said a few things yesterday that were delivered without full knowledge of the situation at hand, and instead of telling me how crafty you’d been with that spot of mischief, you just sat there and took it, and I will _not_ be making that sort of mistake again if I can help it. You’re far too wily for me to rest on my laurels like that. It was quite the little trick you pulled, and I _appreciated_ the gesture. All right?”

Aziraphale’s hand goes away again after a squeeze and Crawly feels like his own has been ripped off.

_I didn’t do it to help you. I didn’t even know. It wasn’t wily, it was a whim._

_I_ _did it myself._

“I said, all right, my dear boy?”

Crawly swallows.

“All right,” he forces out, grateful for the lack of s-sounds.

“Very good. Not another word about it then! A regrettable misunderstanding and water under the bridge.”

It isn’t an apology. At all.

It’s not even sodding close.

And even if it were, it’s complete festering bollocks.

But Aziraphale forgives him, and Crawly breathes through the pain like he always does.

“You know,” Aziraphale adds, shaking his fork at Crawly as he finishes his dish, “you were upset enough yesterday that after I discovered what you were really about, I was worried.”

“Worried?” Crawly croaks.

“Mmm. It was rather messily managed on my end, and when you have a certain look about you, you tend to get a bit…restless. Reckless? Yes, that’s better. I shouldn’t want you to deliberately go running your head into trouble over me. Hurting yourself on, on my account.”

“You wouldn’t?”

“Of course not.” An irritated line appears briefly between blonde brows. “What do you take me for? Do you think I want them to go sending a different demon down here? Imagine the initial reports I should have to file.”

Crawly’s self-destructive streak is profound, but it isn’t a bit haphazard. Sure, there are plentiful times when the wretched void that once was flooded with Her love feels like too supermassive a hole to cart around any longer. And yeah, his wings were magnificent once, cream flecked everywhere with gold like the scattered stars She told him to build for Her glory, and the toxic tar-black of them reflecting sickly green and garish purple hues disgusts him enough to want to rip them out from time to time when he’s preening them. And definitely, you don’t forget being boiled alive for what felt like millennia and in retrospect might well have _been_ millennia, for all Crawly could perceive time by the end of it, if time even existed yet, reduced to nothing more than a desperate wish to _fucking die already._

But even if the angel has cocked the rest of it up spectacularly, it’s a bit cheering to know that Aziraphale noticed Crawly’s distress. Knew him well enough to see it at all.

“Promise me,” Aziraphale continues. His voice lowers, deepens. “Do please promise me, Crawly, that you won’t leave here and do something utterly mad. The last time we had a tiff, you nudged a certain abandoned infant into the arms of a rescuer, and that did _not_ work out well for you, as I recall, did it now?”

Crawly winces, rubs his eyes under the glasses. The infant had been named Moses and Crawly had been seriously contemplating filling his pockets with rocks and walking into the Nile—not that it would have even discorporated him, but it would be nice down there he thought, the silence and the reeds and the fish—when he heard a baby crying and saw a basket floating through the bulrushes. His fingers snapped instantly. But he was stupid enough to report to Hell he’d just burdened someone or other with an unwanted child, fomenting terrible unrest for the family in question, rather proud of the picture he was painting. When Moses led the Isrealites out of Egypt, however, and Aziraphale pulled that truly impressive parting the Red Sea bit of miracling, his superiors were _not_ pleased over unauthorized miracles and Crawly had been ordered back to Hell on the double for a little meet-and-greet on the subject.

All this, Aziraphale knew. He probably imagined there had been paperwork. There was. But he didn’t know what Hell had done to him while he was gone, because Crawly didn’t like talking about getting his skin flayed off any more than the next slave.

“Er. Yeah, no, that did not go well for me. Not so much.”

“Crawly, do take those off for a moment.”

Aziraphale sounds so quietly urgent that Crawly pulls up his sunglasses, tosses back the hood.

The angel bites his lip in distress. “You still look…well, a bit wild, my dear boy. Promise me.”

“Angel, I—”

“You _will p_ _romise me,_ ” the Guardian of the Eastern Gate half-commands and half-begs.

“Yeah.” Crawly’s throat is tight. “Yeah, sure, angel. I promise. I won’t do anything stupid.”

It’s as if a halo blooms. It’s only the sun creeping toward its zenith, but still. Aziraphale smiles, and there’s such _tenderness_ in the expression and Crawly can’t be making this up, _he can’t_.

_He loves me._

_He might be afraid of me, of us, he’ll never want me, he’ll definitely never feel the way I do._

_But he still loves me._

“Anything for whadya call it—professional courtesy,” Crawly adds.

He tries to sound wry. But he really does mean _anything._

_I would carve a mountain into a statue of you. I would go back to Hell no matter how many times or what tools they used. I would put a nebula in a glass globe for you to keep your parchments from blowing away._

“In that case, I consider this to have been a very fruitful meeting.” Aziraphale extends his hand. “It’s a bargain, then. We’ll both keep our wits about us a bit better.”

Crawly shakes. They can’t kiss, probably not ever, but their palms can.

“I’ll go see about the bill, my dear.”

“No, I can—”

“Please, this was my treat. Emergency conference and all that. Back in a tick.”

The angel slides away from the table. Crawly is still a right mess, so he considers it yet another blessing. Reaching a long index finger out, he touches the edge of a waxen leaf.

“See?” he whispers. His plant rustles in agreement. “See how he loves me? I told you. You probably didn’t believe me, you idiot, but see how perfect he is? How _good_? He tried to protect me, you know. He tried the first day. From the rain. I don’t like the rain, didn’t know it yet, but anyhow he put his wing over me even though a whopping huge snake had just slithered up for a chat right after introducing the humans to original sin. He’s the only light when he’s in the room, I _told you_ , you scabby little nuisance. He’s handsome and soft and the smartest creature I’ve ever met, and he still loves me. It’s only because he was made that way, but it’s enough.”

The palm seems doubtful.

“It has to be enough,” Crawly murmurs. 

They part an hour later outside the tavern. Crawly doesn’t ask where the angel is going, and the angel doesn’t offer the information. But the gold stitching around his neck is slipping off one shoulder a little, and he’s smiling so sweetly, and Crawly can taste the hot pierce of desire at the back of his throat.

It’s not a lot of shoulder. And anyway, he’s seen all of Aziraphale plenty of times. There was a river in Eden, and a snake in an apple tree, watching with curiosity and something else, something achingly admiring, as the principality shucked everything off and walked into the water with a look of pure joy, palms and face to the sky in worship, before falling deliberately backward completely under and proceeding to splash about like a dolphin. Aziraphale is solid as a rock, powerful muscles hidden under thick buttery layers of self-indulgence, and he makes a rather striking Effort in the male direction. Since Crawly tries both interchangeably, swaps genders out on a whim, he wonders vaguely why the angel is always a man. Doesn't he realize he can choose? Crawly doesn’t know whether he does anything about said Effort, but even if it’s ornamental, it’s…perfect.

All of the angel is perfect.

No, he’s seen Aziraphale in the buff plenty of times. But now he only gets slices, so he hoards them like golden coins.

“Well, mind how you go, and it was very nice meeting your _trash_ ,” Aziraphale smirks.

“I gave them a house,” Crawly blurts out. He hears an echo of an even more hysterical whine long ago, over a flaming sword.

_I gave it away._

“I beg your pardon?”

“The uh, the widow whatever, and her mum-in-law, they’re in better digs now, sss’all I’m ssaying. They’ll be squatters, more or less stealing really, that’s properly demonic business to be about. Safe, though, roof over the head and all that. Thought I’d get one last bit of work in before I left town.”

“Oh, Crawly,” Aziraphale breathes. 

He doesn’t say anything more. His eyes crinkle at their edges, a pale porcelain color in the bright sun.

He dips his white eyelashes. Then the angel simply reaches out and tucks a loose curl back into Crawly’s hood. 

Feels the softness overlong as it lazily slips through his blunt fingers.

_Don’t be stupid right now. Please, please don’t be stupid again._

_It'll kill you._

“Right!” the demon yips. “Right, I’m off then.” He’s already fleeing, tossing remarks back over his shoulder. “I’ll have a devil of a time with the cattle traffic if I’m any later. Well, I’ll have a devil of a time anyway, but. Nevermind. I’m throwing this trash in the nearest rubbish pile I find, by the way! Blasted nuisance, litter. This guy’s for the closest skip!”

“Yes, I’m sure,” the angel answers dryly.

“Welp. I’ll be seeing you around!”

“You will,” the angel says, straightening. Squaring his shoulders. His tone is utterly unreadable, but his eyes are still lit. “You absolutely will. Have a care, my dear.”

Crawly turns away from the angel standing in the middle of the road with a single sturdy hand raised in farewell before he does something rampantly moronic, like falling at his feet and kissing the hem of his garments.

_Would you mind that so very much? Me kissing your robe? Washing your feet? Anointing them? It couldn't be sacramental oil but I could come up with something._

He’s miles outside of the city in hill and grazing country, actually feeling the burn in too-lean but muscled legs, when he stops. Just breathing too hard, eyes to the sky.

“Why?” Crawly demands. “Is thissss another one of Your sssick jokes? Drop a fellow on his head in a lake of fire then dangle an _angel_ under his nose?”

There is no answer, of course. There never is. Just a scrim of clouds, the few wildflowers edging the roadway, and a flock of sheep nearby, chewing placidly.

“ _What the fuck_?” Crawly demands at the top of his lungs.

Feeling a bit better, he tucks his plant under the opposite arm. He has no notion of where he’s going on this lovely and horrible day. But he’ll get there. He’ll get there one bloody step at a time.

“Shut up,” he says to the palm tree. “I will feed you to those sheep. They'll think you're delicious. Watch me do it.”

The plant hums. Waves in the wind and the air and doesn’t utter a single word more on the subject.


	3. Chapter 3

It’s seven days walking away from Bethlehem with a plant under his arm. Seven days of wayfarer inns and pastoral villages and stretches of desert and _no thank you_ to anyone offering him a ride (Crawly has to walk this frustration over the angel out of himself, needs to bleed some of it into the dirt of the road so it doesn't encrust into the dirt that's himself). It's a full week, a holy number. A week before the demon realizes that he’s _tired_ , bless it, and he’s _dusty_ , and his jugs have been miracled back to full of wine too many times and require actual fermented substances. Not liquid pulled from the ether.

Crawly sets his plant down at the side of the road. It’s still very hilly, and beyond the brush and bracken, down in a valley, he can see signs of human life. At least, there’s a main road and several hearty offshoots and plentiful clean white-bricked structures of the sort they have here, and since he’s been heading inland from Bethlehem for no reason whatsoever, when he flicks his tongue out he tastes salt on the air.

_The Dead Sea._

_You know, you really would be more appealing if you didn’t still walk, talk, sense, and act like a snake, you idiot. You’re supposed to be a bloody_ mammal. 

_Let’s give that a go, hmm?_

_You could practice, maybe, while you've some down time. Putting some white in your eyes those few millennia ago was a nice start, now get your pathetic tongue under control._

“Oh, what do you know,” Crawly scoffs wearily down at the palm. Its leaves are likewise chalky from the journey, and although it has been watered from cisterns and shouted at to grow a pair, it shows signs of wanting to droop. Not of _drooping_ , mind. But wanting to. 

“Fine, throw in the towel, see if I care whether you die of thirst here or get kicked by a mule.”

The plant regards him stoically. Crawly remembers Aziraphale’s genial snark back at the tavern with a pang, _you and your…your very pretty trash_ , like he didn’t believe a word Crawly was saying, like he thought Crawly _cared_ about the stupid plant, like Aziraphale knew perfectly well that it wasn't going into a skip, and the demon feels a sharp pang plunge through his breastbone.

_Why does the only being in Creation who gives a toss about you have to be an ANGEL?_

_Why why why why why why._

“Right.” He scrubs a hand over his face. “OK, we’re stopping here for a while maybe. Not for you, for _me._ I am tired of your lip, and I’m going to stick you up on a rooftop so I can get some bloody peace.”

Crawly squints at the town below. It looks orderly and bucolic, a pretty village near the shores of the Dead Sea where they weave cloth and count their goats and collect eggs from their hens and don’t get many callers. He can tempt plenty of folk in such places. Squints next at himself, sore-boned and frayed from the trip.

 _From missing him. It’s all from missing him. You could walk ten thousand miles on bare feet across a lava bed if it was for him._

“Right. Time for a change of clothes,” Crawly decides.

His eyes fall shut, long lashes fanning his face. Crawly makes a small gesture with his bony fingers like a curtain being pulled up and down, or a zipper. When he opens his eyes again, the lashes are longer, the calves a different shape, the face subtly molded, thinner brows, the swinging hips marginally wider, the lean waist leaner still.

The small, firm breasts on her chest are different too. So is what’s now nestled delicately between her legs.

Her hair can stay the same, she decides. It only needs a thorough wash and she can put it to rights later. After concentrating a moment, she wears black robes with violently scarlet apples prettily embroidered on the neck and the sleeves.

Crawly does not, in significant fashion, look any different than she did before. But it’s charmed too, and any mortal eye lighting on her is going to see a shockingly red-headed, sharp-featured, weirdly tall, sly-smiling woman with clever, haunted amber eyes and a posture that could knock buildings over. Some find her irresistibly beautiful, others ungodly alarming.

“Oh, come off it,” she teases the houseplant as it gapes at her. Her voice too has changed subtly, higher and less apt to snarl. “Haven’t you ever watched a snake shedding its skin before? No? Or a demon changing its corporeal form? Well, but we’ve established you’re exceptionally stupid though, haven’t we? We have indeed. Pick your blessed jaw up off the floor and let’s get a bath. You look like a fucking dried bouquet of herbs.”

Crawly lifts the stunned houseplant easily atop her shoulder, feeling much refreshed, and sets off down the hill. She doesn’t make this Effort all that often—it’s harder to be respected, much harder to be feared, easier to attract abuse, easier to be targeted.

It’s also _so sodding much easier_ to walk, though. Satan, how she loves walking in this form. She doesn’t have to mind the silly sea legs she has on land, her spine can undulate as it pleases, and nobody blinks at her when she makes delicate hand gestures for emphasis.

 _Aziraphale never blinks at my mannerisms even when I’m not like this. But he enjoys this one, it always makes him smile,_ she thinks, swallowing the familiar sugary heartbreak. _And he always asks, too, since the charm for mortals bit doesn’t do shite to an angel. He never just assumes. Why hullo Crawly, he’ll say, are you wearing particularly natty dress-up for a Greek-natured gathering full of wine and song, or are you different today? I’ve done the other plenty of times too, still been a male, so he always asks. He never lets himself get it wrong. Like it doesn’t matter to him._

_Or like it does matter to him._

_Like it all matters. Like the devil’s in the details._

_Like I matter very much._

Crawly rolls her own yellow eyes at herself. She feels so much lighter now, though. Like she could fly to the village without her heart weighing her down, a stone tablet in her chest marked AZIRAPHALE. It’s easier to actually fly as a female in fact, faster. That’s mattered in the past sometimes. In 3004 BC, to be specific. Her revoltingly ugly wings would cut through the air like a sable arrow if she brought them out to play at the moment. She tosses her hood back and lets her hair blaze fire-orange, doesn’t think about the snake tattoo Hell burned in charcoal on her face, feels the breath of salt against her smoother skin.

“Really?” Crawly turns to her houseplant.

Its dusty leaves shift in the breeze.

“Oh,” Crawly says, surprised. “Nmph. Well. Ta very much, then. But flattery will get you absolutely nowhere, you glorified twig.”

One conveniently free room on an upper floor with a view of the valley, one bath, three glasses of wine, a nap, and a misting for the houseplant later, and Crawly is leaning on her elbows out her new window. The sky is clear and full of brine. She can see butcher's shops, a few other cafes with rooms to let above them, a block-long marketplace, a temple, and beyond that, groundswell blocking the true horizon. Her hair is drying in the sun, rippling flames licking their way down her back. There's a little stone ledge on the window where she put the plant.

 _Wouldn't be much else I'd want right now,_ she thinks, like she always does, _if there were only an angel around here._

_That's a load of cat piss, actually._

_It wouldn't matter where I was, as long as he was there too. I could be in sodding Siberia._

"You've made your point," she sniffs at the palm. It has perked up so happily its leaves are shining. "And that point is you're a shite travel companion and a bloody baby who wants to be coddled constantly and a horrific pain in my arse. I want you to _grow better._ "

The plant is unaffected. Crawly is tired but at peace enough not to care. Her joints still snap. There's still a jagged-edged black hole in her chest where God’s Grace used to be, a hollow like a tar pit. Her spine still sings to be a snake instead of a woman. She hasn't forgot millennia of constant (and then afterward only occasional) torture. She knows the angel will never be truly hers and she'll never curl up against his broad chest while kissing him and she'll never be forgiven and it will all end up one day with Armageddon and her being cast into the bottomless pit in chains for a thousand years.

But the wine here is pretty good, and the angel does love her.

_He can't help it._

_Well. Lucky you._

"What should I be today, d'ya think?" Crawly tosses her hair in the breeze like a farmer hoisting wheat with a fork, lets the air blow through it. She could miracle it dry but doesn't want to. This feels remarkably nice after the past ten days or so. "Rich Widow Gambit? Harlot Double-Blind? Soothsayer Bait-and -Switch? Helpless Traveler Trap? The Pony Seller Ploy?"

Crawly lets her hair fall and watches the light caress shimmering green leaves.

She flicks one of them, hard, with a long and even thinner than usual finger. "Fuckwit. I made all of those up, shows what you know. Try to improve yourself while I'm gone. I know you won't, but hmrph, d'ya think you could _try."_

Crawly spends the first afternoon and evening in the streets around the market, sniffing out prospects. That man selling the purified salt in little sacks has a mistress and his wife is with child. The patron of the tavern down the road a ways waters down his drinks (she samples as she goes). The woman with the fruit basket on her head killed her husband in cold blood, but when Crawly looks further into it, all she can think is _well done, you._

The next day, she sends a plague (she's still a bit fond of some plagues, their simplicity to execute) of wild dogs into the marketplace at the peak shopping hour. No one is bitten and everyone is startled and yelling and cursing and taking Her Name in vain and it's exactly the kind of unrest she enjoys fomenting. She watches from her window with the palm plant and a glass of wine, grinning from time to time as the people flee and scream and the dogs chase and scamper.

Three of the tamest dogs are co-opted into working as sheepdogs for impoverished shepherds and will now sleep by warm fires at night.

The day after that, Crawly does a bit of what Ligur calls "craftsmanship" ( _Satan himself,_ Crawly hates Ligur) and leans against a bar with her tits up and hair down and ruins the marriage prospects of a man whose secret hobby is raping whores. After he's completely in her thrall, she gets him drunk enough to kill a smallish camel, and he ends the night (unbeknownst to her until morning) drowned in a public laundry pool.

 _It wasn't ever_ my _fault,_ she tells her houseplant. _I didn't_ make _him notice me, or drink all that, or try to float in what amounted to a duck pond._

The day after that, feeling a bit guilty over the death, Crawly goes back to what she excels at and miracles none of the sheep to go in the appointed direction the shepherds guide them, only at right angles and opposites. She sits barefoot in a grassy patch, sipping wine slowly, smiling at frustration and utter anarchy.

That night, she fires off three reports, making each individual act sound absolutely depraved, its aftermath grim, which is the trick of the thing.

But the next day, Crawly senses a change in the weather and shudders violently.

She can't quite smell the ozone yet, it's on the very tip of her nose. But when she licks the air and it's present for the first time, she almost gags. A taste like electricity and crackle and mud and death and putrefaction.

_No. No, no, no, please not that, it's been such a nice almost-holiday so far._

It's not here yet, but it's coming. None of the humans can tell, of course. None of them know that at this very instant, hurtling toward the village at grotesque speeds, crackling and spilling and blasting its way through the atmosphere, is the one thing Crawly hasn't taught herself to be ironic about yet. 

She's learned to look at a pair of hooks high up in a sodden dungeon wall and say, _Hey guys, who's it hanging? Me, I figure, right?_ She can saunter into the coffin box and not start banging and carrying on till a week or more have passed, just thinking about the angel the whole time. How gentle he'd be, and how kind, if he knew she was locked in a cage exactly the size of herself. No, thumbscrews and beatings and don't even get her started on what they do to your wings down there when they feel like it, all of that can be borne simply because she's had worse. 

You can bear about anything, Crawly understands, if you've already had worse or longer.

This, though. She's never seen anything worse. Never in her long, long, lonely life.

Crawly detests thunderstorms.

Crawly hastens with her figure-eight footsteps back to the inn. Tosses some coin down in front of the proprietor. Thanks him, miracles away any questions. She scrambles back into her room, locks the door, and bangs her forehead in distress against it as she starts writing sigils.

_No noises from within shall burden human ears._

_No sounds caused by anything within shall be harkened unto._

_No sight or essence from anything within shall be accounted in mortal reckoning._

_No mortal shall pass this threshold or any other entrance to this chamber while I am within._

Crawly keeps going until she is muttering along with the spells and can't think straight. Yanking the startled plant out of the window, Crawly battens down the hatches. Locks the window. Binds it to stay locked, _or else._ Her palm rustles softly, concerned. 

”Sssstop looking at me like that,” she snarls. Furiously, she puts it on the little bedside table. Sits down, attempts to calm herself. 

It’s only a few miles away now, and it’s coming. Very, very quickly.

“A thunderstorm,” she answers the palm, pressing her palms into her eyes. “Never did like rain, but. Ngggh. _Thunderstorms._ Hate, hate, hate, hate, no thank you.”

The palm frowns, openly worried now.

“Mmk, I really cannot be conscious for this,” she sighs. Deftly, Crawly weaves her hair into a braid. “Right, I’m knocking myself for six and I just watered you, so you’re _fine_ , do you understand me, you little moron? There will be no shirking. No wilting, no shriveling, and if I see a blessed _leaf spot_ when I wake up, you’re getting dried and pressed in a book. Permanently.”

Crawly closes her eyes, lays down, and shoves her fingers against her own temples. 

_Unconscious. Go. How about now? Or now? Now would be pretty spectacular. Before the lightning and the thunder and the death and the corpses everywhere everywhere everywhere. The rotting bodies. The bloated husks._

“All right, enough of this. You’re going to dream of him till this is over.”

She lifts her right hand from the coverlet.

“I fucking detest self-miracles,” Crawly says through her teeth.

Which is very likely why she botches this one. Hissing, Crawly snaps her fingers and falls into a fathomless sleep.

And immediately into a dream. A dream that is also a memory. And, since she wasn’t paying terribly much attention when her fingers snapped, a nightmare.

_They are sitting in a tavern, of course they are, the two of them. It is a sickly grey outside the windows. The rain had already begun in ghastly pelts as they stood in the cart together. The holiness of it burned Crawly's skin slightly as it trickled down his face. But this time, Aziraphale didn't show Crawly the underside of his wing, offer it for a refuge._

_This time, there is no refuge. And the water falls in holy torrents._

_"We can't let this happen." Crawly is only a little drunk, but his heart fights like a rabid, scratching thing. "Angel, we can't. D'ya hear me? Oi. Angel."_

_Aziraphale sits there as stoically as he stood before that horrible line of paired animals. Two and two and two and two and two and two and a unicorn missing. Folding both lips into his mouth. Breathing in. Out. In. Out._

_The angel is not all right either._

_"Kids, Aziraphale, those are_ children _, and not Her children either. You wanna roast some kids alive, fine, roast your own. Roast me."_

_The angel looks up at that, mouth parted again in shock. Then he frowns, hard._

_"But don't murder other people's fucking kidssss, angel," Crawly hisses violently. “Don’t drown them like a sack of sickly kittens.”_

_"She..." For once, Aziraphale is at a loss for words. "They are all of them, all creatures great and small, Her children, Crawly, don't pretend that they aren't. You can't just--"_

_"Then how in fucking plague-ridden Hell can She twist her own kids into monsters, lookit me, angel, no really_ look _, this is a goddamned snake you’re actually having a drink with and never forget it, mmkay, and then She can turn around and fucking wholesale slaughter a great fucking load more of Her own motherfucking kids?" Crawly cries out._

_The angel winces, but there aren't any people in the tavern to object. They've run home in terror._

_Or run for higher ground. Praying. To absolutely no avail. She's the One doing this in the first place._

_"Nghh. I just, you know what? Fine. It's fine. You can't, y'said? Fine. You can't, but I fucking_ will."

_Crawly stands up and slams his ale down. Aziraphale regards him with steely grey eyes wide for an instant before growling, "Sit down."_

_"Erp, didn't quite catch that, sit down I think you said? No, angel, no, I'm going out there and I'm--"_

_"Going to do what exactly," Aziraphale snaps. There is a hand gripping Crawly's wrist now. It looks like delicious bread dough and the strength of the supernatural courses through it like a live wire. "I've been thinking."_

_"Oh well then, outstanding, great sodding lot of good that'll do those--"_

_"Sit," snaps Aziraphale, "down, my dear."_

_Crawly is sitting the next instant. He hadn't a choice, not really. There won't be a bruise, but it was...compelling. Under his rage and the disgust he feels like bile in his throat, Crawly is vaguely aware that he would very much like the angel to do that again. In other circumstances._

_“Listen,” Aziraphale says lowly. “I can’t…disobey direct orders, not the way you can.”_

_Crawly thinks of Falling, of the angel’s beautiful white wings scorched raven-black, the pure despairing pain of it, the love ripped out of him so he'll never stop bleeding inwardly, and he whispers, “I know, Aziraphale. I’d never ask you to. M’sorry. I’m so sorry, I—”_

_“Hush,” Aziraphale soothes. “Now, it’s perfectly natural for me to be on the Ark when this…happens.”_

_“Yeah. ‘Course. I’ll be on my—“_

_“My dear, please stop talking. I will be on the_ deck _of the Ark. In the open air. Waiting. And you…well, if you were to bring me anything, deposit it for my safekeeping, then I could hardly say no to that, could I? It wouldn’t be my fault. I’d just be…making the best of a bad situation brought on by your clever trickery. Wouldn’t I? It wouldn’t be in my nature to allow harm to befall whatever you decided to deliver unto me, as it were.”_

_It takes Crawly several slow seconds to understand this. But when he does, he lurches forward, grips Aziraphale by both wrists. Holds on. He can’t help himself. The love he’s experiencing is too big for this mortal body, bigger than any Flood._

_“I can’t miracle this,” he gasps. “They’ll see, they would know, the things they’d do to me—“_

_“For God’s sake no, you cannot miracle this, but—”_

_“But I can fly,” Crawly whispers._

_Aziraphale looks even paler than usual. He turns his delicate hands over so they’re gripping Crawly’s wrists in return._

_“Yes,” he says. “You’re the most beautiful flyer I’ve ever seen.”_

_They haven’t done it often. And it was always early days, after the Garden—learning what they could both do, understanding their powers in this strange realm of mortals and apples and wild animals. But a few times, nights that are indelibly etched in Crawly’s memory, they’ve flown together. Towards mountaintops, towards the stars he made._

_Crawly doesn’t let the angel go when he stands up._

_“As many as I can,” he vows. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”_

_“Ah, absolutely no discorporating, I would be extremely cross with you,” the angel answers sternly. He stands too, and their hands fall apart, the connection crumbling like ancient temples. “As many as you can. I’ll see you soon. Have a care, my dear boy.”_

_“Erk, no, wrong, I’m faster the other way,” Crawly teases._

_He tugs at the air before himself and then he is herself instead. The angel’s tongue darts out in surprise. And if Crawly is showing off a little, her hair wild, touch of lip color, well she’s a demon, isn’t she? She has every right to indulge in the sin of vanity._

_“You’ll catch flies like that, angel,” she quips, winking._

_“Oh, for Heaven’s sake.” Aziraphale rolls his eyes extravagantly, but not without drinking her in again afterward. “Mind yourself, do you hear me? I can’t have you crashing into—”_

_“I got this, angel.” Crawly flicks her hood up. “Don’t get eaten by an alligator. Or kicked by a stallion. Or stung by a tarantula. Or—”_

_“You’ve made your point, Crawly,” Aziraphale protests, hands fluttering._

_But the demon can hear him, in spite of everything, trying not to laugh. And it is enough._

_The downpour outside leaves sanctified red tracks on Crawly’s skin. It’s not actual holy water, not by a long shot, but it does hurt._

_“Here goes nothing,” Crawly murmurs before taking to the skies._

_Crawly finds children wherever she can. And she does confine herself to the children—she can carry more of them, and they are blameless in a way she never was. In a way their parents cannot be. She finds them in stables, on hilltops, on roofs, in attics. They are terrified. But they are alive. She lifts them in her arms, on her back, between waterlogged wings. Their parents forget about them instantly. It’s an extra miracle every time and it exhausts her. But Crawly can’t stand the mothers’ screaming. She’s heard too much screaming already, a great deal of it her own._

_The water rises and rises. Every time she finds the Ark again, she sags in relief and then strains forward. Aziraphale sweeps the children up in his own holy arms, ready to whisk them into the endless-capacity room he’s miracled below decks, ply them with kittens and rabbits, looking increasingly terrified beneath the stoicism. Of what, Crawly is uncertain._

_“Crawly, you cannot push yourself this hard,” he growls on the twentieth or thirtieth delivery, wind whipping his robes and rain lashing his face. “And your_ skin _, Crawly, what is going on, for God’s sake come inside and let me—”_

 _“Leave Herself the fuck out of it, if you please,” Crawly snaps before_ flap swoosh _and she’s off again._

_All told, it’s a hundred and three children before Crawly, only a mile or so away from the Ark looking for dry land again, takes a lightning bolt and crashes into the new ocean that was once Earth._

_She can’t drown. She doesn’t need air. But she can burn, and oh how she burns. Nothing has hurt this much since Falling. There’s mildly Godly water everyplace, in her nose and eyes and mouth, choking her, it’s on her skin, clogging her ears, saturating her wings. Is that sulphur she’s smelling? It can’t be. There is fire everywhere, fire seeping into her pores and infecting her veins._

_The pain is staggering. Crawly tries to fly and she can’t. She tries to swim and she can’t._

Land, _she thinks as she starts shaking in agony._ Land, land, land.

_But there isn’t any land left. She is too late. It’s over. Crawly is going back to Hell and if they find out what she was doing, they will torment her for hundreds of years. Decade after decade with no angel, no wine, no jokes, no—_

_The water around her explodes as a pure white fireball crashes into it._

_Where once she was underwater, Crawly is now in the air. A supernatural entity has her in a bridal carry, and she clings to its shoulders. The entity is incandescently angry._

_“You absolutely incorrigible demon, I told you_ no _discorporating, and now just look at you,” Aziraphale snaps over the gale. “The state you are in, I swear on all that's holy! I can’t even dry you off in this wretched mess, not till we get back to the boat, do you have any idea of how worried I was, I could barely see you under there and then what would you have done? Hmm? Caught a ride from a whale? I am so angry with you, you’ve no idea! What were you thinking, what would I have done?”_

_Crawly smiles stupidly against the angel’s soft neck. She’s still shaking, but she doesn’t mind as much anymore._

_“You looked for me.”_

_“Of course I looked for you, what do you take me for?”_

_“You found me,” she says, glowing._

_Aziraphale huffs, gathering her even tighter._

_“Of course I found you.”_

_When they get back to the Ark, the angel dries her off. Tends to her. Frets over the burns and snaps salve into existence when he can't miracle them away. It would be bliss, in a sense, if there wasn’t so much horror everywhere. Crawly learns the children’s names and plays dice with them when she’s still too weak to move. She switches back to a male body when the phantom burn of the Flood waters refuses to go away. Crawly befriends the animals. He particularly likes the snakes. By day, he talks with Aziraphale and entertains the children and by night he curls up and tries his best to sleep._

_And if sometimes, there is a gentle hand in his curls when his breathing has settled and Aziraphale thinks he won’t notice, he doesn’t say anything._

_And if sometimes, he thinks he hears Aziraphale whispering, “You ridiculous, beautiful creature,” he doesn’t say anything._

_And then Aziraphale is a dove with a branch, and Crawly lets himself think for the barest moment everything is going to be fine._

_And then the Flood waters recede and he sets electric yellow eyes on the thousands of corpses._

The inn’s door bangs open at the highest pitch of her scream.

Crawly shuts her eyes and slithers off the opposite side of the bed, ready to put it between her and any threat and further ready to rain all bloody hell down on whoever the intruder is. 

That is, until she hears in rather panicked tones, "Oh, my dear Crawly, whatever has happened?"

Crawly cracks an eye open. She's clinging to the edge of the bed, a feral thing, a _hellthing_ , a _spawn of Satan_ , still in her human body but about to split wide into a serpent, when Aziraphale shuts the door behind him and locks it again. 

“ _What_ is that I—Crawly, is there a botched miracle in here?” the angel demands in horror.

It’s nighttime. It’s still raining outside, pissing down, raining _buckets_ and all the children will drown. Again.

“Oh Lord above,” Aziraphale sighs when he understands. “Crawly, it’s only me. I’m fixing this. All right? You’ll feel…well, bit of a tingle, can’t be helped, but it’ll all be better in a jiffy, I promise.”

Crawly whimpers. Releases her death grip on the bed.

“Make it stop,” she gasps.

Something like light washes over her. It’s also something like liquid gold, and something like perfect bath water, and something like honey, and something like love, even if _not in that way, he can't love you the way you love him_. The next moment, she is propelling herself off the bed and into a pair of extremely strong arms, and then an angel’s hand is around her waist, and another in her hair, and he’s just shushing her with soft sounds and now the rain is just a pitter patter and not so much of a death knell and she’s smelling cedar and vanilla and _Garden_ and she can’t help the tears filling her eyes.

“You’re not in Bethlehem anymore.”

“No, dear heart,” he says against her brow, and Satan below, if that is going to be her new nickname, then all the legions of Hell could come for her and she wouldn’t bat a single eyelash.

“You looked for me,” she breathes.

“Of course I did.”

“You found me.”

He pulls back from her. But not with his body, that remains, it’s only so he can see her face. Aziraphale’s eyes grow steely, but somehow warm as well. Molten.

“Of course I found you.”


	4. Chapter 4

Crawly wonders, considering the whole _no, you cannot be near me all of the time_ debacle, how long Aziraphale is going to let her cling to him before he gets testy about it.

But he doesn’t seem to mind. The angel returns her head to the crook of his neck. He holds her, and he slides his hand against her nape, under the thick red braid, and Crawly is really going to have to get a hold of herself before something horrid happens. Thank all the dark forces of evil she’s a her at the moment, or there would probably be a mortifying erection pressed against Aziraphale’s thigh. Which is simply _not on_ , not when you’re being rescued from a shite miracle by your hereditary enemy. Who keeps murmuring things at you like _I’ve got you now_ , and _everything’s going to be fine._

“I—ermk,” she fidgets. “I’m sorry.”

Aziraphale is highly unimpressed. He often is. “Goodness. There’s no need to be, Crawly.”

“Welp, I’m pretty sure you weren’t planning on miracling yourself to wherever-this-bloody-is to rescue a really really _really_ dumb demon from a crap sleeping spell.”

The angel just makes a humming sound. All at once, the weight of the very recent panic and the all too accurate memories and the aforementioned appallingly crap miracle hit Crawly like a ton of bricks and she sags, grasping Aziraphale’s shoulders.

“Whoopsie daisies, none of that if you please,” he says steadily.

_Honest to Lucifer, angel, who talks like this?_

And then another miracle happens. Not a real one—a metaphoric one. Because Aziraphale calmly sits on the bed propped up against pillows, but he’s _still holding her_ , and then she is curled up with her head under his neck, and the torrential rain and the wind are just birdsong and waterfall patter and a cart over gravel and a breeze in autumn leaves. She fists her hand in Aziraphale’s robe, hearing an amenable hum before his thick, capable fingers cover her slender ones.

She doesn’t know quite how to process this development. She isn’t built for it. There’s no rubric. But she could take a pitcher of holy water to the face right now and die happy, she thinks.

“Does this always happen?” Aziraphale asks softly. 

“Do I always conjure hellscapes for myself when going beddy-bye? Nope. Usually don’t need the conjuring part, they just, er…happen sometimes.”

“No, not that, I’ve seen you sleep often enough, the rest of it. During…tempests, I mean to say? Does it all come crashing back to you?”

“M’usually conked out,” she admits. “Almost always. Ssss better that way.”

“Well. I can certainly imagine.”

“Yeah. I mean, you don’t have to imagine…you were there too.”

“Crawly, I didn’t nearly discorporate myself physically ferrying over a hundred children to safety or take two weeks to recover from simmering in a sea of holier-than-usual rain like some sort of demonic goulash. I was _fine._ Don’t be ridiculous.”

“A hundred and three kids,” Crawly whispers. “You did enact a water rescue, though. You were incredibly narked off about it.”

Aziraphale sighs as only the angel can sigh. When she feels a slight smile against her skin, Crawly looks up and realizes he is admiring the houseplant, which looks decidedly relieved at the shift in her fortunes. Its foliage has perked jauntily, and there’s a new leaf sprouting from its crown. The smugness is presently not to be borne.

“Listen mate, I will dry you out and burn you for kindling if you keep ssstaring like that,” Crawly threatens with index finger outstretched. It’s almost worth the grip Aziraphale had on her hand, to retain a morsel of dignity. Not quite, though.

“My dear girl—wait, is this the, ah, the entire package as it were, or a more cosmetic decision?”

Crawly shrugs, throbbing with fondness. “Nmf. Female. I can change back if you like.”

“Why ever would I want that?” The angel sounds baffled.

_If I thought I could be enough for you, do you have any idea how hard I’d try? If you wanted to hold me like this voluntarily, not because your only real friend almost just lost her mind, and that would have fussed you something terrible, angel, do you know that I would never, ever leave? If you weren’t doing this because you’re made of love and therefore love me by default, do you know that I think it would make everything, absolutely every single second of torment, worth it after all?_

_It's a right shame you’re in fact doing this because I’m the only other immortal sod stuck on this rock._

“Do you remember little Benyamin?” the angel asks.

Crawly lets her hand creep upward, lets it be so near the angel’s skin above his robe that she aches with it, and then he folds their fingers together for the second time and flying has absolutely nothing on this feeling whatsoever. Her breath catches. She swallows.

“Er, runty little guy, always chasing after Bekah? Maybe eight or nine?”

“Yes, that’s the one.” Aziraphale squeezes her hand. “Well, after…after what happened, I didn’t blame you for sleeping for so long in the ah, aftermath, I suppose. What was it, two hundred years?”

“Two hundred and nine. In Luoyang, China. They made a brandy out of plums that was like getting hit with a two by four.”

“Ah, yes. Quite so. It was a such a long while before the Earth in Mesopotamia really recovered, and I was needed, I was hard at work that entire time, you can imagine, what with so few people and so much to do. They set up a colony, Noah and his family and your rescues. They were of course rather stunned at the volume of stowaways, but I smoothed all of that over, made it seem natural—it took another rain bow to convince them they weren’t about to face Her wrath as all the children marched off the Ark, but it wasn’t a bother for me. They’re really rather pretty things to make.” 

_You absolutely absurd, endlessly loving idiot._

“But anyhow you missed it because you were indisposed, and I don’t think I remembered to tell you all those years ago, what with one thing and another. But Benyamin and Bekah eventually married. Seven children, all living on a prosperous farm. Only one lost in childbirth. They grew positively ancient together and both died within the same week, quite cozily at that. They were very, very loved. I thought you ought to know.”

Crawly manages to smile. “He finally caught up to her, did he? Good on you, Benyamin. Little bastard wasn’t fast, but he was blessedly determined.”

“Yes, he reminds me of someone.”

Crawly freezes. This…this is not good. The angel already quashed that plan, the _Being Together_ plan, but sometimes the angel gives Crawly whiplash. With a supreme effort of both physicality and will, she sits up, sliding her hands away.

“Cheers for the miracle, angel,” she tries to say brightly.

“What are you doing?” Aziraphale wonders.

“Erp, well, you must have been working on _something_ when you figured out I was in a bad way, just supposed you’d want to be getting back to it by now, yeah? You were probably mid-blessing when you—wait, how _did_ you know to come, uh, snap me out of it?”

Aziraphale glances at his hand as if it’s bereft of something. “Good question. I can’t really tell you with any accuracy. But do you remember when Cain murdered Abel and I could do nothing to stop it?”

Crawly bites her lip, distraught. She doesn’t like to think about that. She had nothing to do with it whatsoever, of course, had in fact been at a department meeting in Hell over strategy for dealing with the fresh humans. Cain came up with that lead balloon all on his own. She—he at the time, rather—couldn’t find the angel after returning, but he could feel him suffering, and so Crawly closed his serpentine eyes and stretched out his demonic perception and eventually located Aziraphale shaking with rage and grief and _guilt_ in the middle of the desert, sifting sand through his fingers over and over again, eyes dry as dunes. Crawly knelt behind him and wordlessly hugged his shoulders and the angel didn’t let go of his forearm for hours.

It was the most valuable— _valued—_ Crawly had ever felt.

“I…yeah,” she falters. “Course I remember. Poor Abel. Poor Cain too, in a sense.”

“Poor _Cain_?”

Crawly touches the brand by her ear involuntarily. She knows all about wearing marks for making mistakes. “Uh, yeah. A little bit. Guy was really scrambled in the head. Anyway, that was a shite day. What about it, angel?”

Aziraphale’s eyes soften to an indefinable color. “You felt me, I think, out there in the sand. I can feel you too. How do you think I found you in the middle of the ocean?”

“Uh. Luck of the devil?” Crawly squeaks.

The angel shakes his fluffy head and the demon cannot take this much longer.

_Do you really have an extra set of clanging alarm bells that scream demon the way mine scream angel, because if you do, that opens up…very painfully unlikely possibilities, and often despair is easier than false hope._

“That’s yeah, OK, makes sense when you point it out,” she manages. “Look, I really don’t want to keep you any longer. Idle hands being my workshop and all.”

“I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about.”

“Devil.” She points at herself. “My workshop. Don’t want to keep you, idle ha—”

“What if I _do_ want to keep _you_?” Aziraphale answers fiercely.

Crawly cannot get her mouth to close for the life of her. She feels like a snake with its jaw unhinged. A tremendous crack of thunder splits the atmosphere and she doesn’t even jump. They could be back on Noah’s blasted Ark all those years ago, everything smelling like a ripe barnyard, Crawly’s skin peeling and Aziraphale endlessly wringing his hands when he thinks he’s not being observed, and she would not give a toss, not when this is _happening_. 

_What is happening?_

Her heart is pumping wildly, a small furry thing caught in a trap and also a bird bracing its wings for an updraft and also a snake in the sun and also a demon being subjected to a careening, frictionless hope that’s either going to save or discorporate her.

“But you don’t,” she whispers. “Want to keep me. I, uh. Asked you.”

Aziraphale winces, likewise sitting up fully. He takes her hand back, in both of his.

“Listen, when you proposed what you…ahem…proposed last week, there was very little preamble,” he states, as prim as ever.

“It—what? Are you serious? It’s all been fucking preamble! Every sodding second since you gave away that sssstupid sword, you complete _nutter_! You can _sense…_ these, yeah, these things,” she backtracks hastily. “You can, y’know, sense preamble. Or you’re supposed to, you’re an angel. Are you defective? You hang around me enough, that would make sense. Anyway, the hanging around me, figured you’d have sensed a significant amount of, of preamble by this time. I watched you _part the Red Sea_ so the Israelites could have an _ocean sidewalk_. I was pretty, nggg, preambled. Not gonna lie.”

Aziraphale squints unhappily. Crawly allows herself an instant to slice a death glare at her palm plant. But it’s not mocking her. Just listening with growing alarm.

“Crawly, would you please calm down a moment and allow me to finish? Thank you. It may have been stupid of me, I admit, but it was unexpected, there in a public space, on an otherwise perfectly ordinary afternoon for the two of us, drinking and talking business, and I was startled and I was _frightened,_ all right?” 

_You have no coolness factor whatsoever_ , Crawly admits to herself, flinching. _You’re going to work on that next. Coolness. That and the hissing thing. And the tongue-tied blanking at language thing. And the slithery walk thing. But coolness first, definitely. Maybe a new pair of sunglasses would help. Cooler ones._

Aziraphale looks miserable. “I didn’t know what precipitated your suggestion, who was watching, whether anyone had, had put you up to it. We aren’t taught to expect that sort of thing from your kind.” 

“My, my _kind_?” Crawly stammers, furious. “D’ya mean _your_ kind, same original stock, just roasted beyond all possible recognition? No, s’pose not, I guess, now you mention it. What were you figuring came afterward, huh? I ask to be around you all the time and the next thing you know, I’ve what, got you trapped in a satanic chalk circle and I’m heating up the branding irons for kicks?”

“Crawly!” Aziraphale protests, stricken. 

“Not a branding iron? Was it a glass-shard-studded cat o’nine tails? Because those hurt pretty bad."

“Crawly,” Aziraphale whispers, “dear heart, I—”

“Admittedly totally in character, you got me there,” Crawly sneers, backing away on her knees. “Biiiiiiig torture fan, me. Can’t get enough of the stuff.”

“Will you please allow me to explain! That thought, that _doubt_ rather, was ghastly of me, I realized almost instantly, but I couldn’t find you to tell you so that night. It’s more difficult when you’re properly asleep, which I take it you were. But I can still locate you, it simply takes me longer, and the next morning when I waited for you on the road out of Bethlehem, I tried to make it all clear. You would never try to trap me into anything. I couldn’t correct my mistake quickly enough. But I was still frightened.”

“Of Falling,” Crawly realizes. Her anger fades as speedily as it flared. “You can’t Fall. You _cannot._ I won’t let you. Please forgive me, I didn’t think it through.”

Aziraphale’s hands are making more frantic than usual gestures, like moths, like flickering candle flames, _oh no, am I the moth or am I the candlelight?_ “No, stop right there. Yes, of Falling, a bit. But also of what would happen to _you_ if Hell were to find out. We are an _angel and a demon_ , this doesn’t have a precedent and I very much prefer plans to impetuosity, but when I heard you from all that distance tonight and you were trapped and hurting so desperately, there wasn’t…I didn’t have the choice to keep dithering any longer.” 

“There’s always a choice, angel. Trust me,” Crawly scoffs.

Aziraphale has the bloody-minded cheek to roll his eyes. “Don’t be a ninny. I got here as fast as I could. Frankly I still don’t believe it’s wisdom for us always to be in the same place at once, because the loss of you would ruin me, Crawly, all right? I’m terrified. Not of your discorporation, though I’d find that rather unbearable as well, but your _loss._ Permanently. What if Hell decides to dispose of a demon who’s friendly with an angel? Or torment you for it?”

“They _do_!” Crawly snarls. “Not, not about _you_ specifically. But what I _choose_ to do up here? The mistakes I make _on purpose_ , the miracles I perform _off the clock_? Yes, angel, there’s uh, there’s torment involved.”

The angel’s eyes have gone entirely glassy and Crawly has never seen anything more miraculous, because it’s not only stupefyingly new, it’s also for _her._ “I hate what they do to you. I hate it with everything in me. I’m not ignorant, I know that Hell is…hellish. I’ve been an absolute coward not asking you about it.”

Cold fear trickles down Crawly’s spine at the notion of this pop quiz. Now that she’s seen the angel almost in tears, she has no desire whatsoever to see the real thing. “S’fine, angel. Really, I don’t—really. I’m used to Hell. Day at the office for me. Filing, stapling. Three-hole punching. Less said the better, you know?”

“But what if it gets even _worse?_ ” She hasn’t seen him this fretful since the Canaanite famine. _“_ What if God Herself eliminates one of us? What if you’re permanently reassigned? What if they drag us both up to Heaven and hand me another flaming sword and order me to smite you?”

“You wouldn’t do it,” Crawly answers, completely sure of herself. “You’d never.”

“You’re right, but that doesn’t matter.”

“It’s the only thing that matters!”

“No, it’s not! I wouldn’t, but _someone_ would!” Aziraphale snaps.

“Suits me down to the ground, if I’m dead and gone and _finito_ , lights out Crawly, then you can catch a break and I can get some fucking peace of mind finally after the last _many, many millennia_!” she shouts back.

Which is a mistake. 

_Do not pick fights with principalities,_ she reminds herself.

 _Second thought, absolutely do_ , she amends when the incensed look on the angel’s face leads almost instantly to him kissing her.

Aziraphale tugs her forward by the hand he’s still holding. His lips leave hers immediately, a gutting absence like having Grace ripped away. They’re both kneeling on her bed now, her terrible nightmare-mussed bed with her terrible nightmare-mussed hair and he stops completely for a moment. Shifting his hands, cupping her too-sharp face, searching her too-yellow eyes for permission with his own stormcloud ones, and Aziraphale is right, the smug bastard.

_There isn’t always a choice._

For all the violence of his movement forward, he gives her every opportunity to pull away. He even drops his hands, imparts a pained _I’m sorry_ expression, _you should tell me no if it’s too much._

She doesn’t. She can’t. 

She tips forward, mouth falling easily open, how could she say no when the angel is _finally finally finally_ kissing her, his lips smooth and wholly warm-blooded, his unspeakable power crackling but tightly leashed, so very tightly, someplace at the top of his spine, near his invisible wings, as if he wouldn’t hurt her for this world or any number of other ones. Crawly tilts her head and _oh yes please_ and if Aziraphale wants to taste her the way he tastes his fucking berry tarts then _yes yes yes always yes that’s fine by me_ , _eat me for supper, lick up every drop._

“You are not going to die,” he breathes against her increasingly tender mouth. _Tender? Nothing about me is soft in the smallest._ “Do you hear me?” 

“Aziraphale—”

“I’m here, and you’re safe. I’ll make certain of it. You’re immortal, exactly the way I am. No one will destroy you.”

“Mnnnnot, uh, not the way you are exactly,” she gasps as he gets a gentle hold of her thick braid. 

“Close enough for a game of horseshoes.”

“Nmk—what? And I’ve never kissed anyone before, just, I’ve only tempted other people to. Am I doing it right?”

“You’re gorgeous, you’re perfect. Absolutely perfect.”

“Oh. Good, then. That’s…good.”

“You _are_ good, you’re so good.” 

Aziraphale is _aglow_ , and it ought to hurt, but it _doesn’t_ , it feels like a sizzling, bubbling, steaming mineral spring, and he presses the handful of twined locks against his mouth. 

“’And the Angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush.’”

“Oh my fu—no. Just _no._ Absolutely not. Sod off.”

“’And he looked, and behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush _was not consumed.’_ ”

“Shut up shut up shut up, no Book of Exodus in my bed, no Book of Exodus _at all_ , especially not about my _hair_ , you’ll give me…I dunno, a bald spot or something. Shut it.”

He tilts her head back and again it’s so gently she could cry, and nips all along the column of her throat. “Well. That’s all right, I’ve made my point. You won’t be consumed, Crawly, I _will not_ allow it.”

Crawly feels like a stringed instrument being aggressively thrummed at its lowest register as the Principality Voice echoes behind the prim-gentle-shepherd voice and meanwhile he said it _into her throat_. Someone is whimpering softly. It’s probably her, she realizes. Aziraphale tugs at the neckline of her robe and finds a collarbone, the merest top swell of a breast, tasting his way like she’s a buffet table, and then his other hand grazes her nipple through the cotton, and now she’s _whining, you are so stupid, he’ll hate it, stop, why are you whining._ The thunderstorm isn’t outdoors anymore, it moved inside, she let it in her bed, _how did it get in here_ , and she _loves it so._

“I always did rather wonder whether we’d…explode, attempting this,” Aziraphale says, improbably laughing.

“Errrgh, nah,” Crawly dismisses, completely breathless, and then, “Wait, _always_?”

“I thought it was obvious.”

“No Aziraphale, fucking angels I swear, it was not _obvious._ ” She feels lightheaded enough to collapse again.

“Is this all right? You’re, you’re upset, I can leave, I can stop—”

“Never stop, _never stop_ , just _shut up for once._ ”

He’s already tugged off the tie at the end of her braid and is carding it out while he kisses her all over her throat, her shoulders, inches shy of exposing more of her but refusing to, and Crawly thinks, _you always did like my hair_ , and then _I am so fucking done for,_ and then _who gives a toss_ and finally _he does._

Crawly plants a set of determined hands on the angel and decides it’s about bloody time she show him which immortal being deserves to be worshipped in this bed and kisses sweetly underneath his ear.

“I can’t stop talking, I—there’s too much you obviously don’t know,” Aziraphale gasps as she scrapes her teeth _gently gently, they’re sharp_ over the tendons she’s finding. “Like what you looked like slithering up the Garden wall and morphing into this otherworldly creature and then you _smiled_ and I was completely wrecked.”

“I can change back, be a man if you—”

“No, no, all the versions of you are beautiful. Next time.”

“You’re giving me heart attacks,” Crawly confesses on a broken laugh. “Several.”

Aziraphale stops again, pulls away _again_ , and Crawly can’t stand it. “All right, sod non-verbal cues, are you OK with this?”

“Yes, yes. But…” Crawly fights a full-body shudder. “What if it hurts _you_? What if you, you, you offend Heaven, what if—”

“Crawly,” Aziraphale says very carefully. He fits her too-lean cheek in his hand. “Oh, blast it all, I’m not saying any of the right things. I’ve wanted you from the Garden wall. It never changed, not even when I was…well, dithering. If that’s how my angelic self has felt for that long, I hardly think our corporations confirming it will make any difference. You know as well as I do that most of those taboos are altogether rubbish, and that neither one of us had anything to do with Sodom and Gomorrah, or with—”

But Crawly is already coming to her senses.

The panic is back, but this time it’s not about the Flood, or the children, or her own damned hide.

It’s only for the angel.

“We have to stop,” she gasps.

He does stop, is the heartbreaking part. He stops on a dime, rolling his forehead against hers, a very strong arm around her back, occasionally kissing her hairline oh so very very softly. Crawly covers her mouth with both her hands, nearly choking on a sob, before she wrenches herself back into commission.

_Not on my watch. Not when I’m going to ruin him._

“We, nnng, we can’t. There’s. You were right, it’s right to be frightened. What if they cast you out? I’d never forgive myself, I’d throw _myself_ into the first bloody bottomless pit I could find.” Her breath is coming too fast and she can still taste the vanilla-forest-grass-sunlight aroma of the angel on her sorry snake tongue, and he doesn’t need this. He doesn’t need to be flying in a thunderstorm holding a lightning rod, and Crawly has _been_ electrocuted. It’s terrible. “I’m not safe for you.”

“You would keep me safe,” Aziraphale answers gravely. “Dear heart, you do it all the time.”

Crawly winces, attempts to breathe.

_I found you in the desert sifting sand through your fingers after the first murder. I helped put lambs’ blood over the doorways when you were wearing a mask doing the same, carrying a bucket and paintbrush, and the firstborn were all done for unless Death passed them over. I tried to keep you safe._

_But I don’t always get it right. When Shechem raped Dinah and she wouldn’t stop crying, and they wanted to give her in marriage anyway, I tempted her brothers to convince them all, every male around, to cut the tips of their dicks off first. It was absolutely hilarious. I didn’t know Jacob’s sons were going to take advantage of the circumcision opportunity and stick a sword in everyone, slash their throats, steal all the livestock. They used their own sister’s rape for a murder and pillage spree._

_They were absolute pricks but it was all my fault. You were gutted about it. I brought you fruit from South America as an apology and you smiled at me. I didn’t eat any of it. I’m going to wreck you._

_I didn’t know._

_I didn’t know._

“Too much of what I do turns to ash,” Crawly whispers. “Almost…almost everything I do. Let go of me.”

The angel does. He sits back, nothing but worry on his round face.

_You did that too, Crawly._

_Fuck you for hurting him._

“This was my fault. If anybody asks.” She scoots back on the bed, sitting on her heels. Crawly doesn’t know what’s come over her corporation, but it’s acting shockingly human. Her lips pulse where the angel was kissing them. Her heart hammers. She can feel his smooth slide of teeth against her chest. It’s soaking wet between her legs, it’ll be dripping any second, _why is it like that,_ her tongue can smell herself and himself too and thunder and heartache and wine and regret and undying love and one houseplant, which is looking at her like it’s extremely upset. “It, that was a temptation. Haha. Gotcha! Heh. I’m good, right?”

“You are good, yes,” the angel answers flatly.

“No, I mean, those were some serious wiles. Faking a nightmare? But s’fine, you can leave now, I’m uh, I’m not willing to lose a known adversary to gain an unknown foe. Just forget the whole thing.”

“You know I can’t,” Aziraphale says in a more severe tone.

“Well, fucking try.”

“I _won’t._ I don’t want to.”

“Well, _do it anyway_!” she cries.

A long silence follows. Crawly’s face is buried in her hands. When she drags it up, the angel is looking impossibly strong and improbably prissy again, standing at the edge of her bed, but his eyes might as well be the bottom of the Atlantic. He leans in and presses his lips just above her crooked nose.

He stays there for much longer than she expects.

“No, I refuse to ‘do it anyway,’” he says as he walks to the door. “Get some sleep, my dear. I’ll be at the tavern downstairs should you need me. Or should you want a chat over drinks. When the storm has blown over, I will leave, and I’ll see you on the next occasion.”

“I’m sorry,” Crawly says, her voice breaking badly at last.

Aziraphale only purses his lips and raises his hand in an efficient snap. “May you fall asleep very soon and wake up having dreamed of whatever you like best.”

He shuts the door. She can hear his feet on the stairs.

Screaming into a pillow, Crawly next grasps the nearest object, which happens to be a plant, and hurtles it at the ground, smashing the pot in pieces.

“No,” she moans a few seconds later. “No no no no.”

Crawly is on her knees on the hard floor. The palm looks up at her with reproach, but also understanding. Crawly closes her eyes, gathers her powers, opens them again. She snaps her fingers too, this time with great care. The palm materializes in a much costlier receptacle hand-painted in red and black glazing, its soil renewed, freshly fertilized and damp but not over-watered. It’s startled but unharmed. 

The chamber looms large and empty. It still smells like angel in here. Crawly has never felt remotely similar to this before. It’s too much. It’s far too little. It’ll kill her. It’ll never be enough. Shoving a hand under her robe, she finds a thin undergarment and yanks it aside, and then discovers a throbbing slit that is positively begging for her to—

“Oh fuck,” she gasps.

She doesn’t know what she likes, at first. But she knows vaguely what other women like, even if voyeurism isn’t her kink, demonically speaking. Her kinks are disobedience, insubordination, and too many questions. This is now one of them. She thrusts her middle finger into a slick, heated pool, much tighter than she’d expected it to be, adds her index when she feels ready to take it, removes both, shifts them outside and parts herself and starts rubbing gently and then faster and this can’t harm anyone else, it _can’t_ , a demon can lust all she likes, might even be a job requirement, and it’s only her here. 

Crawly’s covered in sin, she _is sin_ , and this is supposed to be a sin, but the angel is right, sex doesn’t damage anyone, not this kind. And anyway, the feel of her isn’t monstrous after all. The crevices of her body aren’t evilly hard or spiked or shell-like, but she has never investigated them before, so how would she have known? If she shoves three fingers inside herself till it stretches and burns, she can imagine it’s closer to the size and length of Aziraphale. If she catches the sparking little nub between her knuckles as they slide, she can pretend it’s not her, it’s Aziraphale. If she gathers more of the wet from herself, coats the complicated folds, she can imagine Aziraphale’s mouth, and it’s Aziraphale.

It only takes a couple of minutes of her fucking her own hand before an overwhelming, electric wave crests. Crawly comes with her teeth buried in her opposite forearm, absolutely not making noise, because then the angel would be flying through the door again. She’s practiced at Not Making Noise, it eggs demons on. Comes so hard it almost hurts, and she’s never _tried_ this before, so there are aftershocks and tremors and bliss and the sharp ache of loneliness echoing through her as if she’s a chasm.

_Which you sorta are, really. A lot of you is gone. And isn’t coming back, either._

She falls onto the floor. No longer frantic but still yearning and exhausted.

_Well, that was a Thing._

Crawly pulls the shocked houseplant flush against her crossed ankles and stifles a few sobs. But a tidal wave of properly miracled sleepiness is rolling over her. She lifts her palm tree onto her nightstand, touches a leaf gently, and tries to summon something rousing to yell at it.

Nothing comes to her. She pushes herself up with difficulty. Crawly settles into the nook that still smells distinctly of angel and falls into a pillow-soft sleep regarding the same subject. Since, after all, he also miracled her dreams, and they’re always the ones she likes best.

When Crawly wakes up a few hours later, it’s still dark outside. Her corporation is sticky. Her houseplant is apprehensive. The thunderstorm has abated significantly, so the angel…

The angel might already be gone.

With a flick of her hand, Crawly cleans her body the easiest way she knows how, which is by switching back to a male one. Not wanting to miracle away anything that might remain of the angel. That would be abominable. Sacrilegious. By the time she returns to that body, it’ll be clean again. Probably. Maybe. Most likely. It usually is, it had healed up perfectly the first time she tried it again after Noah’s abominable floating zoo.

Tumbling out of bed, Crawly lifts his plant from the table. 

“I…”

He swallows, wordless again.

“M’going to see if the angel is still here.”

It seems to entirely understand that urge. He sets the palm back down.

“And, and do not even _think_ about getting into any trouble while I’m downssssstairs,” he hisses. “You have no sense of self-preservation, I grant, you just let me ssssmash you like you were _nothing_ , but I’ve put too much work into this Whole Plant Thing to tolerate your, your low self-esteem or whatever. Sure it’s well justified, but I’m not going to all this trouble just to watch you self-destruct, you’re going to be fucking _fine_ , and if you so much as droop over this, you are kindling for my next fire. Are we clear?”

The plant indicates that, distressingly, everything is all too perfectly clear.

“Fucking lippy little shrub,” Crawly growls, erasing his wards and hurtling down the stairs.

For an instant, he panics. The tavern below is dark, stuffy, and pleasant, but sans angel. His otherworldly eyes soon adjust, however, and there he is, _there he still is,_ in a corner by the fireplace, nursing wine poured from a large carafe and staring at sheaves of parchment. Looking up, the angel sees Crawly and smiles tightly. There’s a second glass on the table, and he fills it, tops up his own.

Crawly collapses onto the bench and takes a hefty swig.

“You had nice dreams this time,” the angel observes mildly.

Crawly chokes on nothing whatsoever. 

_Coolness,_ he thinks in despair. _You’re giving yourself coolness lessons every goddamn day from now on._

“No no, I didn’t look at them,” Aziraphale huffs in a near-laugh. “I wouldn’t, Crawly. I only know they were nice.”

“M’not nice,” Crawly retorts hoarsely. “They weren’t _nice._ ”

“Fine, whatever you say.” The angel has a way of Looking Like He Knows Better that deserves to be slapped. Or kissed again, kissed every blessed morning, noon, and night. “And you’re quite all right, my dear? Only, you’ve changed.”

“Egh, that me was all…nightmare-y,” Crawly dismisses. “Bad mojo. Lousy at miracles, too. Forget you saw her.”

“No,” the angel answers placidly, “I don’t think I shall. Though I feel precisely the same way about this you.”

_You feel the same way about everything in Creation, angel. Me, rocks, kittens, lice, poor people, rich people, babies, alfalfa shoots, lichen, wooly mammoths. It’s just that I’m around more. For longer. I know you better, might be the only one who knows you at all who’s still alive. I knew you when neither of us knew anything at all. We have history, and that’s why I confuse you so much, why you can love me and still tolerate my…everything. You don’t have memories with anybody else, but that’s entirely coincidental, can’t you understand that? Our preamble is an accident._

_I’m someone you can remember, your best friend, and you’re my everything. That’s all. Love is harder for you to parse through, when it’s me._

Aziraphale has caught the hem of his black sleeve and is rubbing his thumb over an exquisitely embroidered crimson apple, humming. Crawly didn’t bother to change his clothes yet and his hair is loose and falling everywhere and he’s a complete skip fire.

“You’re very sentimental, aren’t you, for a demon?” Aziraphale asks gently. Then he drops the fabric and snaps his fingers. A deck of Sumerian playing cards appears between them, replacing the parchment. “Care for a game?”

Crawly can breathe again. He gives a sharp-toothed grin, quips something about Aziraphale’s gambling tells not fooling a donkey, and they are _them_ again, and that’s fine.

_It will all be fine. Just breathe through it. This is fine._

They play cards until the sun comes up and the storm stops. They drink a great deal of passable wine. They talk. They tease. Occasionally they argue. They laugh.

And if Aziraphale when taking his leave smiles warmly but doesn’t say where he’s going, that’s all right, that’s what they do.

And if Crawly doesn’t thank him for the rescue, not out loud, that’s all right, that’s how they are together.

And if Crawly turns up his senses to maximum after packing more wine jugs and tucking his palm plant against his neck, feeling the angel walking away from him at the identical time he is walking away from the angel, just breathing in that he’s _there_ , on Earth, even if nowhere near him, that’s all right too.

Aziraphale never needs to know.


End file.
